1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to providing services from a remote computer system to a user station over a communications network and, more particularly, to automated identification of users.
2. Background Art
Electronic publication is an exploding industry in which thousands of new products including magazines and periodicals, software applications and utilities, video games, business, legal and financial information and databases, encyclopedias and dictionaries are purchased by millions of customers. Commonly, such information products are replicated in computer-readable form on magnetic or optical storage diskettes and are box-packaged with printed manuals for distribution to retail stores and direct mail sales. These marketing practices are relatively expensive and involve a significant time lag of at least days or weeks to get a product into a consumer's hands once it is created.
Such costs and delays are generally acceptable for original, high value products such as collections of publications or software application, of which some examples are NEWSWEEK® Interactive CD-ROM, or disks, which provides a searchable audio-visual library of issues of NEWSWEEK magazine and CINEMANIA® CD-ROM which provides reviews and other information on newly released films. For time-sensitive, low-value updates, for example, the latest issue of Newsweek or last week's movie reviews, distribution in stored form, on physical media, is slow and the cost may exceed the value of the information in the product.
Thus, electronic transfer from a central computer server to a subscriber's computer over common carriers or wide area networks is an attractive proposition. Similar considerations apply to the distribution of software program updates, although cost and frequency of issue are not such serious constraints. A problem faced in both situations is that of incorporating the received material with the original material so that a fully integrated publication, information database or software program is obtained by the user.
Another class of electronically distributed information product comprises home shopping catalogues of mail order products distributed on optical or other digital data storage disks which may contain text, sound and images from printed catalogues or uniquely created material, for example software application demos. To applicant's knowledge and belief, available products lack any computer order placement capability, requiring orders to be placed by voice call.
Communication between remote computers, not directly interconnected by umbilical cable or a wired network, is enabled by a wide range of hardware devices and software drivers, utilities, applications and application modules. Telephone modems that couple a computer with the telephone network are familiar devices. RF modems that couple computers into wireless networks are less familiar but are beginning to appear in consumer devices known broadly as personal information communicators (PIC's) of which personal digital assistants (PDA's) such as Apple Corp.'s NEWTON® product are a first generation. New kinds of digital communications devices can be expected to emerge as digital technology replaces analog transmission.
General-purpose, online, modem-accessed, electronic information services, such as PRODIGY, COMPUSERVE and AMERICA ONLINE (trademarks), and some Internet services, provide wide access to timely information products from a central server, but are limited and complex. They provide no means for the integration of downloaded information with information products offered on disk or CD, and provide only rudimentary facilities for local viewing and search of downloaded files.
Such online information services provide their own user interface which is generally unlike that of a disk or CD-based information product, and can be customized very little, if at all, by a publisher using the service for product distribution.
Online services are oriented to extended online sessions which require complex user interaction to navigate and find desired information objects. Initial setup and use is rendered complex by requirements related to extended session use of data networks and the frequent need to navigate across the network, and through massive data collections, to locate desired data items. General-purpose online information services do not provide a suitable medium for electronic information publishers to distribute updates, and the like, because of limited interface flexibility, because a publisher cannot expect all their customer base to be service subscribers, and because of cost and payment difficulties. Such services are centered on monolithic processes intended for national use by millions of subscribers which processes are not readily adaptable.
Online service charging mechanisms are also inflexible and inappropriate for most individual information products, requiring monthly subscription fees of $5-10 or more, plus time charges for extended use, which are billed directly to users, after a user sign-up and credit acceptance process. Such cost mechanisms are too expensive and too complex for distribution of many products such as magazine and other low cost update products. They do not presently permit a publisher to build an access fee into a purchase price or a product subscription.
Recent press announcements from corporations such as AT&T, Lotus, Microsoft and MCI describe plans for new online services providing what are called “groupware” services to offer rich electronic mail and group collaboration functions, primarily for business organizations. Although offering multiple electronic object transport operations such services are believed to have complex setup procedures and software requirements and complex message routing features and protocols, and to lack interface flexibility. Accordingly, they are not suitable for mass distribution of low cost electronic information update products.
Communications Products
Many software products exist that enable one computer to communicate with another over a remote link such as a telephone cable or the air waves, but none enables a vendor substantially to automate common carrier mass distribution of an electronic information product to a customer base employing multiple heterogeneous systems with indeterminate hardware and software configurations. Two examples of popular such software products are Datastorm Technologies, Inc.'s PROCOMM (trademark) and CENTRAL POINT COMMUTE (trademark) from Central Point Software, Inc. which are commonly used to provide a variety of functions, including file transfers between, interactive sessions from, host-mode services from, and remote computer management of, modem-equipped personal computers wired into the telephone network.
Counterpoint Publishing's Federal Register Publications
Counterpoint Publishing, (Cambridge Mass.) in brochures available to the applicant in November 1993 offered electronic information products entitled “Daily Federal Register” and “CD Federal Register”.” “Daily Federal Register” includes communications software and a high-speed modem. Apparently, the communications software is a standard general purpose communications package with dialing scripts that are customized to the needs of the Federal Register products. Accordingly, the cost of a communications package license which may be as high as about $100 at retail must be included within the product cost. Also, Counterpoint Publishing avoids the difficulties of supporting various modems by providing its own standard modem, with the product, building in a cost (about $100-200) which renders this approach quite unsuitable for mass-market distribution of low cost electronic information update products. The resulting product is not seamless either in its appearance or its operation because the communications software is separately invoked and used, and has its own disparate look and feel to the user.
The “CD Federal Register” provides the Federal Register on CD-ROM at weekly intervals for $1,950.00 and CD-ROM disks are shipped to customers as they become available. Back issues are $125 each. Updates are provided by shipping a disk. The Federal Register is a high-value product intended for specialist, business, academic and governmental users. Distribution of updates on CD-ROM, as utilized by Counterpoint Publishing, is not a suitable method for lower value products such as a weekly news magazine, because of the associated costs. Shipping delays are a further drawback.
While the two product “CD Federal Register” and “Daily Federal Register” might be used together, at an additive cost, to provide a combination of archives on CD-ROM plus daily updates obtained and stored until replaced by a new CD-ROM, based on information available to the present inventor it appears that the two products must be used separately. Thus they must apparently be viewed, searched, and managed as two or more separate collections, requiring multiple steps to perform a complete search across both collections, and requiring manual management and purging of the current collection on hard disk by the user.
Xcellenet's “REMOTEWARE”®
Xcellenet Inc. in product brochures copyrighted 1992 and a price list dated Aug. 16, 1993, for a “REMOTEWARE”® product line, offers a range of REMOTEWARE® software-only products providing electronic information distribution to and from remote nodes of a proprietary REMOTEWARE® computer network intended for use within an organized, corporate or institutional data processing or management information system. The system is primarily server directed, rather than user initiated and requires an expensive program (priced at $220.00) to run at the user's node whereas the present invention addresses consumer uses which will support costs of no more than a few dollars per node.
Furthermore, REMOTEWARE® is primarily intended to be used with other REMOTEWARE® products at the node which other products provide a range of user interface and data management functions, at significant additional cost, each with their own separate user interface presenting a standard REMOTEWARE® look and feel. In addition, the nodes require a sophisticated central support and operations function to be provided, which may be difficult for an electronic information publisher to accomplish and add unacceptable expense.
REMOTEWARE® is overly elaborate to serve the simpler objectives of the present invention. Designed for the demanding needs of enterprise-wide data processing communications, the client or node package provides many functions such as background operation, ability to receive calls from the server at any time, ability to work under control of the central server to survey and update system software and files and an ability to support interactive sessions, which abilities are not needed to carry out the simpler information transport operations desired by the present invention. Such capabilities may be desirable in an enterprise MIS environment, but are not appropriate to a consumer or open commercial environment, and bring the drawbacks of complexity, cost, and program size, which may put undesirable operational constraints on the user (and perhaps even compromise the user's privacy). REMOTEWARE® is too costly and complex for mass distribution of updates to periodicals, cannot be shipped invisibly with an electronic information product and requires specialized server software and operations support that would challenge all but the largest and most technically sophisticated publishers. Accordingly, REMOTEWARE® is unsuitable for widespread use as an economical means of distributing updates for a variety of electronic information products.
Although it has wider applications, a significant problem addressed by the invention is the problem of economically distributing updates of electronic information products to a wide customer base that may number tens or hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions of consumers. At the date of this invention, such a customer base will normally include an extensive variety of computers, operating systems and communications devices, if the latter are present, all of which may have their own protocols and configuration requirements.
While an electronic information product vendor might consider licensing or purchasing an existing commercial communications product for distribution with their publication product to enable remote, diskless updating, the high cost of such a solution would generally be unacceptable because a communication package includes a broad range of functionalities not required for the vendor's particular purpose, for example, remote keyboarding. Significantly, a commercial communications package is not susceptible to customization of its user interface and may have its own configuration requirements and installation requirements, with regard to directories, device drivers and the like, which are incompatible with other vendor or user requirements or are simply a nuisance to the user. Thus, a commercial communications product in addition to its cost, cannot be satisfactorily integrated with an information product.
There is accordingly a need for computer-implementable information transport software to enable simple, economical and prompt mass distribution of electronic information products.